The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine Read Free

dining room were on the interior side. One opened into the spacious corridor that ran the entire length of their suite and gave access to the deck on bothends; the other revealed a gray passageway and a metal staircase that led up to the captain’s deck and cabin and down into the engine room, galley, and quarters for the yacht’s small, unseen crew.
    “So it kept all its feathers,” said Sandrine. “If you don’t think that’s possible, you don’t know doodly-squat about birds.”
    “What isn’t possible,” said Ballard, “is that some giant parrot got out of here without opening a door or a porthole.”
    “One of the waiters let it out, dummy. One of those handsome
Spanish-speaking
waiters.”
    They sat on opposite sides of the stately table. Ballard smiled at Sandrine, and she smiled back in rage and distrust. Suddenly and without warning, he remembered the girl she had been on Park Avenue at the end of the sixties, gawky-graceful, brilliantly surly, her hair and wardrobe goofy, claiming him as he had claimed her, with a glance. He had rescued her father from ruinous shame and a long jail term, but as soon as he had seen her he understood that his work had just begun, and that it would demand restraint, sacrifice, patience, and adamantine caution.
    “A three-count?” he asked.
    She nodded.
    “One,” he said. “Two.” They put their thumbs into the round holes at the tops of the covers. “Three.” They raised their covers, releasing steam and smoke and a more concentrated, powerful form of the meaty odor.
    “Wow. What is that?”
    Yellow-brown sauce or gravy covered a long, curved strip of foreign matter. Exhausted vegetables that looked a little like okra and string beans but were other things altogether lay strewn in limp surrender beneath the gravy.
    “All of a sudden I’m really hungry,” said Sandrine. “You can’t tell what it is, either?”
    Ballard moved the strip of unknown meat back and forth with his knife. Then he jabbed his fork into it. A watery yellow fluid oozed from the punctures.
    “God knows what this is.”
    He pictured some big reptilian creature sliding down the riverbank into the meshes of a native net, then being hauled back up to be pierced with poison-tipped wooden spears. Chirping like birds, the diminutive men rioted in celebration around the corpse, which was now that of a hideous insect the size of a pony, its shell a poisonous green.
    “I’m not even sure it’s a mammal,” he said. “Might even be some organ. Anaconda liver. Crocodile lung. Tarantula heart.”
    “You first.”
    Ballard sliced a tiny section from the curved meat before him. He half expected to see valves and tubes, but the slice was a dense light brown all the way through. Ballard inserted the morsel into his mouth, and his taste buds began to sing.
    “My God. Amazing.”
    “It’s good?”
    “Oh, this is way beyond ‘good.’ ”
    Ballard cut a larger piece off the whole and quickly bit into it. Yes, there it was again, but more sumptuous, almost floral in its delicacy, and grounded in some profoundly satisfactory flavor, like that of a great single-barrel bourbon laced with a dark, subversive French chocolate. Subtlety, strength, sweetness. He watched Sandrine lift a section of the substance on her fork and slip it into her mouth. Her face went utterly still, and her eyes narrowed. With luxuriantslowness, she began to chew. After perhaps a second, Sandrine closed her eyes. Eventually, she swallowed.
    “Oh, yes,” she said. “My, my. Yes. Why can’t we eat like this at home?”
    “Whatever kind of animal this is, it’s probably unknown everywhere but here. People like J. Paul Getty might get to eat it once a year, at some secret location.”
    “I don’t care what it is; I’m just extraordinarily happy that we get to have it today. It’s even a little bit sweet, isn’t it?”
    A short time later, Sandrine said, “Amazing. Even these horrible-looking vegetables spill out amazing